High Water Wheeler

I almost dread canoeing on a sunny holiday.  They are the days when I most expect to see that person from your high school who was voted, "Most Likely to Drown", and the person voted "Second Most Likely to Drown".  As it is, I arrive at the put-in and no one else is around. It is nothing short of a complete freak of nature that I have been out three days in a row over a vacation weekend and not seen anyone else in the water.

The tide is high and still coming in for most of the next hour.  One catches some weird currents in a salt marsh as it fills with water coming from any direction so long as it is the path of least resistance. I head in the upriver direction, and then sneak through narrow openings toward the Central Phragmites Patch. There is one visual which I find noteworthy.  With almost no snow this winter, last year's entire growth of spartina is still standing, and the marsh has an appearance of a flooded wheat field.  Typically, a good snowfall will flatten the spartina, leaving it looking more like a harvested soybean field.

As often as I paddle in this marsh, it is still easy to miss a turn.  Landmarks are usually the shape of some turn or intersection of channels.   But, those landmarks are only relevant at specific tides.  Everything looks different if the water is high versus when it is low.

A pair of northern terrapins

There are no birds at the phragmites patch, so I continue across towards Nell's Island.  On the way, I spot a dozen Swans, a few Ducks, a distant flock of 30 or 40 Plover, and a few Great Egrets. I collect a plastic milk crate, which I start to fill with plastic bottles, and a cheap-shit plastic fake Adirondack chair.  I find these crap-ass chairs in the water quite often as dumb people leave them on their dock seemingly unaware that wind exists. I manage to park the chair on the aft of the canoe where I don't have to look at it.

I head into the Nell's Island maze. I've been in here a half dozen times or so and I figure that I am about 50-50 on finding my way through. I use the high tide to explore some of the other possibilities and then make my way to the top of the island with only one short misstep.  But, the exit channel is blocked by a heavy timber that has lodged itself quite firmly across the channel.  So, I turn and take a channel that had kicked me out of the island on an earlier trip.

 I head over and all the way up Beaver Brook. There are quite a few Yellow Crowned Night Herons in the upper marsh and in the brook. I spot one pretty good sized snapping turtle, well up in the brook.

I head back out, not having seen another paddler the entire time.